Cambodia's government land grabs

Mark Moorstein knew little about Cambodia before he got involved in a lawsuit on behalf of land owners there. But as it’s turning out, the suit could end up affecting most every country in Asia.

Moorstein is a land-use lawyer in Northern Virginia who, like many lawyers, was looking for some pro-bono, charitable work to do on the side.

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“I kind of got hooked on the International Senior Lawyers Project out of New York,” a lawyers’ human rights advocacy group. “They’ve done a lot of really, really high-level stuff, very good stuff,” Moorstein said.

It happened, said Heather Eisenlord, a lawyer with the project, that “one of our volunteers living in Cambodia contacted us and asked us to come up with an international remedy for land-grabbing.” Soon, someone from the project called Moorstein, he said, “and asked me if I had any interest in taking a look at Cambodia from a land-use perspective.”

And so it began.

Across Asia, almost every country is guilty of baldly seizing its citizens’ land without significant compensation and then selling it to corporations or developers, leaving the owners homeless and often destitute.

In China, for example, local government officials have accrued almost $2 trillion in debt that isn’t on the national government’s books. So year after year, Xia Yeliang, an economics professor at Peking University, said in an interview, local mayors grab residents’ property, sell it to developers, use the money to make the minimum debt payments and then pocket the rest — leaving the standing debt for the next mayor, who is likely to behave the same way.

China’s illegal land seizures — usually with no compensation — are reported to have netted $482 billion in 2011 alone, the most recent year for which figures are available.

Similar problems exist in Laos, Vietnam, Myanmar and other Asian states. Arguably, however, Cambodia has the biggest problem. Over time, The Cambodia Daily newspaper reported recently, the government has seized almost 5 million acres — 10 percent of the nation’s entire land mass.

Diplomats, human rights groups and non-governmental organizations have been loudly complaining about this for decades. Finally in 2001, Cambodia enacted a Land Law intended to curb these seizures. But like so many measures passed to mollify the Western donors who keep the government afloat, the government immediately began ignoring its own law. Now, as one major Cambodian human rights organization put it: “In Phnom Penh and the 12 provinces” around it “land-grabbing has affected an estimated 400,000 Cambodians since 2003, helping to create a sizable underclass of landless villagers with no means for self-sustenance.”